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OSbea

OS.bea working group

Welcome to the Open Standard Business and Enterprise Application (OS.bea) Working Group.

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Scope, Goals and Vision

The OS.bea working group drives the evolution and broad adoption of technologies of the Open Standard Business Platform (OSBP) which is an open source Software Factory combining no-code, low-code as well as traditional model driven and automated application development. Based on domain specific languages, it is made for users who want to implement by modelling tailor-made business or enterprise applications the fastest and easiest possible way. For more detailed information see here.


The working group:

  • manages the overall technical and business strategies for OSBP driven projects.
  • defines and manages a specification process to formalize the specifications that are defined within the scope of this working group.
  • defines compatibility rules and branding process for implementations of these specifications to ensure application portability.
  • promotes the "OS.bea" brand and its value in the marketplace.
  • provides vendor neutral marketing and other services to the OS.bea ecosystem.
  • establishes and drives a funding model that enables this working group and its community to operate on a sustainable basis.


The OS.bea working group (OS.bea WG) fosters and supports an open and innovative eco-system providing tools and systems, and adapters for standardized, openly-available and vendor-neutral OSB Platform as described above. In particular, the OS.bea WG:


  • helps to support OS.bea related Eclipse projects that develop the related software components
  • provides the resources for managing the quality and the maturity of these components throughout the life-cycle
  • defines compatibility rules and branding process for implementations of these specifications to ensure application portability.
  • ensures open innovation through the sharing of the research, development, and maintenance efforts as far as possible
  • fosters exchanges between academics, standardization organizations, industry partners and community

Governance

The OS.bea working group is designed as:

  • a working group driven by its strategic members,
  • a means to foster a vibrant and sustainable ecosystem of users, contributors and service providers,
  • a means to organize the community of each project or component so that strategic users and developers define the roadmap collaboratively.


In order to implement these principles, the following governance bodies have been defined:

  • The Steering Committee
  • The Specification Committee
  • The Marketing and Brand Committee

Challenge

If Gartner and Forrester are to be believed, no-code and low-code platforms are the new silver bullets to solve all software development and maintenance issues. Now a day rapid changes are present in all businesses and only digitally transformed companies can successfully meet customers’ expectations and cope with new competitors. The question that arises is: how can organizations keep pace with the “wind of change”?

Approach

The solution is simple: create business applications through configuration and customization rather than coding. Configuration means that an application is specified by creating models of business logic and workflows, the UI as wells as the data it processes, its interfaces, etc. Priority is given to WYSWIG (what you see is what you get) tools as for e.g. UI-, ERM- (entity relationship model), workflow designer. The advantage of such designers is evident: the technical barrier is low and people without any professional software engineering background, so called “citizen developers”, are able to create sustainable applications without direct involvement of IT departments. It also enables professional software developers to successfully implement rapid prototyping processes through short iterations, getting direct feedback from end-users which is a necessary premise for any agile method like SCRUM.

As requirements get more complex, e.g. in a ERM environment calculating the sales forecast of a product, WYSIWYG editors might not dig deep enough and developers tend use traditional software development strategies as solution. But why wander from one extreme to another extreme? Low-code technics can help. When analyzing issues in a certain domain one can find that the issues arising are very often composed of the same core requirements. Staying with your ERM example, in ERM environments often prices must be calculated. Why not implement a low-code acronym “getPrice”? And every time prices are to be calculated, call the price calculation via the low-coding “getPrice”. The careful reader might ask himself: where is the difference to a function library? Well you might think none, but wrapping functionalities in low-code give citizen users access to configuring their business requirements without having the need to write specifications without waiting for the availability of their IT-departments. No-code and low-code tools give access to much faster product lifecycle iterations enabling organizations its agile digital and continuous transformation.


Take the idea further

The ideal world would combine all technics from no-code over low-code to traditional coding in one development environment usable by professional developers as well as from citizen users. Professional developers concentrating on the implementation of core functionalities of a company’s business domain capturing and validating complex business logic and wrapping it in low-code or no-code and handling it over to business users. Therefore a suitable toolkit such as Domain Specific Languages (DSL) must be included in a no-code and low-code development platform (NLP). The Open Standard Business Platform (OSBP), an Eclipse project, is such a NLP. OSBP matches all beforehand described properties. OSBP took the idea even further. Instead of developing commonly used functionalities such as data access, UI-Frontends, business rules etc. it wraps open source frameworks in a DSL-architecture which do the required job without getting dependent of a certain framework, as the business requirements are described in independent models.

Charter

The draft of the proposed charter can be reviewed here


Relevant technologies

Have look on the relevant technologies. The names speak for themselves: Click here.

Communication

We have a mailing list: Subscribe for news and discussions here

Who we are and how to join

The initiative is in an early stage and many organizations have already shown interest. If you are interested, please communicate your name, e-mail address and the name of your organization via the OS.bea working group mail list (see chapter communication above).

Working group meeting

June 6th, 2018 - Agenda

The next working group meeting will take place on June 6th, 2018 at:

MEGA eG, Franz-Wachter-Strasse 20, D-70188 Stuttgart

The meeting languages are English, German and French.

Time Subject Speaker
09:45 Greeting and introduction of the participants Marc Klaiber

CEO
MEGA eG

Christophe Loetz
CEO
Compex Systemhaus GmbH

10:00 Visit to the meat factory of MEGA eG Stuttgart Marc Klaiber
11:45 Eclipse Foundation: neutral host of open source in the corporate world Ralph Müller

Managing Director
Eclipse Foundation Europe GmbH

12:30 Open source licenses: a jungle full of pitfalls?

How Eclipse prevents "Micro-Statehood" and unexpected constraints and how it ensures fair interaction in all future development steps

Ralph Müller
13:00 Working Groups: conjointly development under a neutral flag; examples from midsized companies Ralph Müller
13:30 Q&A Plenum
13:45 Break
14:30 Open Standard Business Platform (OSBP) - the software factory for an agile business Christophe Loetz
15:00 Open Standard Business and Enterprise Application (OS.bea) Working Group Charter: the „constitution“ for joint work Christophe Loetz
16:00 Q&A Plenum
16:30 Estimated end

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